Amy Beth Kirsten

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT AMY BETH KIRSTEN

A composer, librettist, vocalist, and director of HOWL, Amy Beth Kirsten was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music Composition, a Rockefeller Foundation Artist Fellowship, and a Harvard University Fromm Foundation Commission. Her projects have been funded by The MAP Fund, ASCAP Foundation, The Leonard Bernstein Family, New Music USA, Chamber Music America, and The National Endowment for the Arts. After spending a decade as a singer-songwriter playing in clubs and bars in Chicago, Kirsten entered the graduate program in music composition at Roosevelt University in 2002. Those earlier years as a performer and vocalist – which yielded an undergraduate degree in vocal jazz improvisation – created the foundation for a compositional language rooted in the voice, breath, and storytelling. Many of Kirsten’s chamber works require instrumentalists to vocalize and play simultaneously, and her purely instrumental works often experiment with melody and timbre. Many of her recent and upcoming works aim to integrate music, language, and movement in theatrical settings. In 2014-15 her “wildly imaginative” (Washington Post) Colombine’s Paradise Theatre, an evening-length, fully-staged work commissioned by the Grammy-winning ensemble eighth blackbird, premiered in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art and in New York City at the Miller Theatre; strange pilgrims for orchestra, chorus, and film commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra premiered in February 2014 in Carnegie Hall. Both of these works were collaborations with director and filmmaker Mark DeChiazza. The duo are now embarking on Quixote, a fully-staged work for Sandbox Percussion, HOWL (3 female voices) and video. Quixote will premiere in March 2017 and will go on tour in 2017-18. Ms. Kirsten\'s work is recorded on her own label, Bad Wolf Music; Parlour Tapes+; and MSR Classics. She lives and works in New Haven, CT and teaches music composition privately and at the HighSCORE festival in Pavia, Italy.